Breach

by Eliot Peper

  And then Emily’s jacked-up senses were scanning for new threats but none appeared and she half expected Rizal to burst in and announce her victory in his booming baritone and the audience to go mad but there was no audience and she was not in the ring but in Rosa’s apartment and Rosa was sitting there like a crab on the floor, breath shuddering in and out of her, the whites of her eyes like blank canvases.

  Adrenaline still flooding through her, Emily tried to take in the scene as Rosa might. Blood was pumping out of the first man’s severed carotid artery, the Taser still gripped tightly in his hand, its wires stretching across the room to the electrodes embedded in the brightly colored weaving, making the strange impression that perhaps his spasms stemmed from his direct connection to the decorative textile, that he was communing with the artistic divine, jacked into a muse like a toddler sticking a fork into a power outlet. The second man had fallen against the delivery crate, halting, hoarse screams inspired and cut short by pain, staring down in disbelief at the handle sticking out of his belly, seemingly unaware of the unnatural angle of his broken leg. And then there was Emily herself, fragment from a previous life, a scarred avenging angel offering salvation in the form of a surfeit of horrors, tears still fresh on her cheeks and bruises livid on her neck.

  “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, sweetheart,” said Emily, surprised at the steadiness of her own voice. “But first, we need to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

  CHAPTER 14

  They careened through the kaleidoscopic vortex of the next few hours. Telling the injured kidnapper to self-administer the sedative to help ease the pain as Emily helped Rosa to her feet and out the door, pausing only to grab Otto. A desperate scramble down the emergency stairwell. Heading for the building’s back door, seeing the delivery van waiting in the alley, reversing direction and exiting out the front. Footsteps behind them, Emily tugging Rosa along.

  Faster. Faster. Faster.

  They lost themselves in the maze of the open market. The smell of roasting coffee, frankincense, and sweat. A goat bleating as it was led off to slaughter. Perched on a wooden crate, a zealot in Orthodox garb yelled through a megaphone in Amharic, his finger stabbing toward the Commonwealth complex. Drones buzzed overhead, invisible satellites hurtling past kilometers higher. Emily knocked over a bale of khat as they rounded a corner, the vendor’s staccato curses fading as they sprinted out of the market and picked up two public bikes.

  Emily summoned her feed to map out routes. They needed flat or downhill sections to pick up speed and had to avoid Addis Ababa University where the streets were packed with students protesting the absence of mandatory human-rights provisions in the feed’s terms of service. Quads burning, lungs aching, they followed the swoop and curve of intersecting bike lanes, glancing incessantly back over their shoulders. Other cyclists swerved out of their way, swearing, as Emily and Rosa hurtled past under the dappled shade.

  Emily pulled up at a random corner, and they ditched the bikes and boarded a minibus. As they squeezed in, Emily actually looked at Rosa for the first time since the apartment. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes wide, her breath coming in short gasps. Emily hadn’t seen her like that since Rosa had come off the field after losing a high school soccer tournament. Emily and Javier had been there on the sidelines ready to comfort her, but Rosa had surprised them both when she shrugged it off with a quip about how playing was more fun than winning. Rosa might be younger, but she’d somehow eclipsed them in emotional maturity.

  The minibus descended into the tunnel system, joining the swarming mass of feed-driven vehicles traversing the vast network of subterranean roads that burrowed beneath the city like geophysical arteries.

  Rosa was trembling on the seat beside Emily, who could feel the heat that radiated off her. Emily reached out a comforting hand, but Rosa twitched away, and Emily jerked it back like a child snatching scorched fingers from a flame.

  “What—” Rosa tried to catch her breath, clutching Otto tight to her chest. “What is going on? I don’t . . . I don’t even know where to start. I . . .”

  Emily met her gaze and looked away just as quickly. Rosa’s forehead wrinkled. She was assessing Emily with fresh eyes, eyes brimming with fear, confusion, and sorrow.

  Emily looked straight ahead and forced her voice to remain neutral. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I’ll get you out of here, and then we can forget this ever happened.”

  “Em.” There was too much wrapped up in that single, strangled syllable. Far too much.

  “Time to get off,” said Emily, lunging for the door as the minibus swooped up to the surface.

  Emily looked around in the sunlight and bustle of the pick-up/drop-off zone. A sambusa vendor hawked her wares. The sour smell of fermenting injera. A mother harangued two kids who were tuning her out, submerged in their feeds. Had they lost Rosa’s prospective abductors? How could they know for sure? No way to know. Time to make their break for the airport.

  Emily hailed a private car, and they plunged back into the city’s underbelly. Emily sat as far from Rosa as she could, staring out at the tunnel lights flickering past, scanning through her feed for evidence of pursuit, obsessively listening to Rosa’s shallow breathing.

  And then, impossibly, they were at the airport and lifting off in the plane Emily had chartered back in Camiguin, the leafy streets of Addis falling away behind them. Questions whose answers led only to more questions. Questions with no answers at all. Exhaustion. Oceans and continents spinning by as the planet turned on its axis. Dreams of garden paths forking and doubling back on themselves, phoenixes rising in flame and falling into ash, an abstract tide of melancholy surging and receding. Bumpy landing in Seattle. Transfer to a seaplane. And here, now, finally, they stepped off the pontoon and onto the dock.

  CHAPTER 15

  Emily looked up and her chest tightened. Waves lapped against the pilings and the smell of brine was overpowering. Mist shrouded much of the Island, drifting in long, ragged fingers, punctured by swaying evergreens. A new wing had been added to the school, and outbuildings stood where there had once been lawns. But the barn was still there, and the orchard, and the vegetable garden, and behind it all the forest brooded, damp and green and full of shadow.

  “They’ve grown,” said Rosa. “There are more than fifteen hundred students, and even the nonteaching staff has tripled. Between his responsibilities as a Commonwealth board member, advocacy, and philanthropic efforts, Javi has his hands full.”

  Emily sensed that Rosa was observing her from a slight remove. There was uncertainty beneath her words, a mixture of concern, fear, and pity that Emily found hard to stomach. This distance hadn’t been there before. She and Rosa had never been self-conscious with each other. After spending so long building a buffer between their lives, Emily couldn’t help but wish that they could pick up their relationship where they had left off, like old acquaintances falling right back into friendship. That Emily was excruciatingly aware of how ridiculous such a wish was only made it that much worse.

  “Come on,” said Rosa. “Let’s go.”

  She squeezed Emily’s hand and pulled her off the dock and up the path. Where Emily had led Rosa in a frenzied escape through her own city, their positions were now reversed, and Rosa led Emily through the compound she had once called home.

  It was difficult to hold back the memories. Endlessly tweaking the architectural plans, popping champagne bottles while initiating a new member into their cadre, getting dirt under her fingernails as she weeded the vegetable garden, staying up all night mining Dag’s feed to prime him for what would be his first and only operation, hiking through the woods with lips and fingers stained purple by wild blackberries.

  It was down this same path that Emily had fled after her betrayal was revealed thirteen years ago. When they opened the backdoor into the feed, giving them godlike access to everyone’s most intimate digital lives, they had committed to never use their powers of suasion on each other. Having broken
that sacred pact, Emily knew she could never show her face here again. When you operated outside the law, the only laws that mattered were the ones you invented. What could be a worse transgression than breaking a law of your own devising? And yet, here she was. But she shouldn’t be, she needn’t be. She had already rescued Rosa, hadn’t she? Emily was useless, damaged, had no more to offer. The others could take it from here. She could fade right into the background, return to self-imposed purgatory.

  “I—” Emily slowed her pace. “I think I’m going to . . . I should . . . You go on . . . Really . . .”

  But Rosa shot her a glare that brooked no argument, a glare that the Rosa Emily had once known would have been incapable of. And so, chastened, Emily forced one foot in front of the other, tried to ignore her churning thoughts and burning cheeks, the unbearable shame that tainted every waking moment.

  “Rosa!”

  Javier hurried down the steps from the deck of the ranch house, did a double take as he saw Emily next to his sister, almost tripped, recovered, and came to an uncertain stop. Rosa had alerted him that she needed refuge, was en route, but Emily had refused to let her tell Javier about her own involvement, didn’t want any of her blame shifted onto the wrong target, even indirectly.

  Javier was dressed in his trademark tight-fitting black leather. While he had always been thin, he now flirted with gauntness, implying a shy praying mantis. His dark-brown hair had turned to salt-and-pepper gray, a wedding band encircled his ring finger, and he favored his left leg. There was also a new but quiet confidence, an air of the patrician about his bearing that hadn’t been there before. The dark eyes of the man who had been Emily’s best friend since adolescence were still as large and deep as inkwells, unreadable emotions flickering through them like the pages of a child’s flip-book, asking, apologizing, demanding, judging, forgiving, haranguing, accusing, and searching, always searching.

  “Hey, Javi,” said Emily, hating the schoolgirlish timidity in her own voice and covering it with brittle humor. “Long time no see.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “Rosa, darling,” said Javier after the story was told, “could you give us a minute?”

  Rosa cocked her head to one side and gave him a look with enough subtext to crash a feed connection, but all she said was, “Sure.”

  She stood, her hand darting in to give Emily’s shoulder a quick squeeze as she passed. Emily twitched, suppressing the subconscious reaction to block what could be an attack, discomfited by how deeply the unexpected small gesture of kindness affected her. The feeling was warm, fuzzy, and unfamiliar, manna from a heaven she wasn’t entitled to.

  And then it was just the two of them sitting in front of the fire. The rest of the residents were respectfully avoiding the large living room that had been their center of operations during the years they had spent subverting the feed. How many times had the world been changed from this room? How many disasters avoided? How many lives saved?

  Javier fiddled with his hands, his long, slender fingers lacing and unlacing like stalks of seagrass in a turbulent current. He would not meet her eyes, but then again, she might not meet his either. Again, Emily felt detached from reality, as if this were a dream and she was an observer and not a participant. Maybe all this was a dream, the entirety of the past few days nothing but a figment of feverish sleep. Dengue was on the rise in Camiguin again, wasn’t it? Or maybe this was death. Perhaps Niko had won the fight after all and the great beyond consisted of nothing more than a palimpsest of memory and imagination, endlessly looping until pure thought faded into nothing.

  Javier stood without a word, his body unfolding slowly from the chair. His steps were silent as he retreated to a far corner, a habit he’d picked up tiptoeing around his mother’s string of abusive boyfriends. If he was a product of Emily’s subconscious, what did it mean that she’d apparently rendered him mute but left so many other details intact? A migraine flared like a match struck deep in a cavern. Enough mental gymnastics. Be this dream, death, or reality, all Emily could do was the next thing.

  “I figure we could both use this.” Javier was back with a bottle of Château Latour and two glasses, his tone reaching for an evasive bonhomie.

  She accepted the wine gratefully, swirling it and watching the purple legs bleed down the sides of the glass in the flickering firelight. Taking a sip, she tasted minerals, ripe fruit, and salty tannins, remembered sitting around this same fire imitating sommeliers with over-the-top bullshit descriptions of wine they’d never imagined being able to afford.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to barge back into your life. It was just that Rosa . . . Now that she’s here with you, safe, I’ll go. You can tell Commonwealth about Lowell’s plans, or not, it’s none of my business anyway. I just—I just couldn’t let them hurt Rosa.”

  His body tightened imperceptibly, a bowstring being pulled taut, but then he forced the tension away, appraised her like an astronomer looking for distant patterns in the cosmos.

  “What happened to you?” he asked, his voice somehow both gentle and edged. “Where have you been, Em? Where are you going back to?”

  Her voice caught. What could she say? She imagined telling him about Camiguin, her squalid little apartment, the torrential typhoons, roti canai, the endless flow of tourists, Rizal, how she could only find peace in violence. But that was somehow impossible to articulate, too big for words, too alien in this Pacific Northwest redoubt. It all felt affected, just some adolescent noir fantasy, as if her life as a fighter was the true dream, nothing but a passing interlude in her real life here on the Island with her friends.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “It’s . . . better you don’t know.”

  Emily twisted the edge of her shirt.

  “Better for who?” His voice was strangely breathless.

  She sipped her wine, stared into the depths of the hearth at the roiling death’s-heads and vortices of flame.

  “Why, Em? Why?”

  She thought of how her shins had ached for the better part of a year while Rizal trained her on the heavy bag, the pain lessening only as tens of thousands of impacts dampened her nerves.

  “Because I thought, I knew, it was important,” she said, and suddenly she was back in her body, no longer an outside observer. “Every year high tide was getting a little higher, storm surges eroded a little more topsoil, the Island got a little smaller. Droughts getting more severe, floods getting more violent, summers hotter, winters colder, biodiversity collapsing, reservoirs drying up, crops failing, refugee camps overflowing, and nobody doing a goddamn thing about it. Heads of state debating like kindergarteners, only signing treaties that required no changes from the status quo, robber barons like Lowell profiting along the way. For decades and decades and decades instead of change being the only constant, the only constant was the tragedy of the fucking commons, which was no change at all. Something had to be done. Someone had to do it. And I couldn’t let Dag’s newfound conscience stand in the way. And—”

  “What”—Javier was shaking his head—“the hell are you talking about?”

  “Javi,” she said, her chest tightening, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It wasn’t worth it. It never could have been. I shouldn’t have threatened Dag. He was one of us, part of the family.” An emptiness was growing inside her, a void filling her like air in a balloon. “But I broke the code. I threatened him. I lied to you, all of you. I thought that just that one time it was necessary, given the scale of the problem and how we had no contingencies left. I couldn’t let so many years of work go down the drain. But I should have. I should have let it all go in order to keep my promise. We’re nothing without our word. If we can’t trust each other, everything falls apart. It’s the same downward spiral that broke the whole system in the first place.”

  Javier’s wineglass smashed into the back of the hearth. The flames danced and sputtered as wine went up in steam. Emily’s body tensed
, her back going rigid.

  Why couldn’t she read him anymore? It used to be that Emily could intuit other people’s dreams, fears, and weaknesses with little more than a glance. That was how she’d managed to survive without adults even after her parents had died, how she’d managed to take in strays like Javier, Rosa, and the rest, protect them, help them file their paperwork, appease the bureaucratic monster, stay out of the hands of the state long enough to reach legal adulthood and set off on their own. She used to be able to finish Javier’s sentences, predict his every move without a second thought. But now he sat there with his eyes closed, implacable, opaque. Had she lost her gift? Had building up her physical intuition in the ring sapped her social intelligence? Was Javier simply a different person now, a stranger? Wasn’t she?

  “I didn’t want this,” he said in a hoarse whisper she strained to hear over the pop and hiss of the fire. “I never wanted this, any of it.”

  Silence.

  “Javi,” she said, emotion thickening her words. “You’re amazing. I’ve followed everything via feed, everything. You’ve accomplished more than we ever dreamed of. You’ve changed the world over and over, and now you’re about to do it again. It’s . . . I don’t even know. It’s . . .”